Question

I want to find and replace (or more accurately, append) some HTML in one of my MySQL database fields, where the field contains a specific string of text.

I can successfully find the relevant records using this query:

SELECT *
FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE `post_content` LIKE '%some phrase%'

This query returns all the records I want to append HTML to.

So I try the following query to append the HTML I want to use:

SELECT *
FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE `post_content` LIKE '%some phrase%'
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '</strong></a>', '</strong></a>
<strong>Some additional piece of text</strong></p>')

But an error is returned:

#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = INSERT(post_content, '</strong></a>​', '</stro' at line 4

I presume it doesn’t like how I’ve formatted my HTML, but how should it be formatted?

Answer 1

you are trying to execute two different queries. My guess is that you need to execute the following one:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '</strong></a>', '</strong></a>
<strong>Some additional piece of text</strong></p>') 
WHERE `post_content` LIKE '%some phrase%'